Posts Tagged ‘
Islamism ’

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain tweeted a striking forum post from a year ago, titled Believing in Jihad and Martyrdom.

I lived my younger years wanting only one thing: martyrdom.

I wanted to die in battle, in the name of Allah.

I wanted the peaceful happy death that martyrs appear to experience with a smile on their face.

I didn’t care who I fought or why, as long as I was fighting for Allah under Islamically justifiable conditions.

Everything in this world was worthless in comparison. You die in the name of Allah, and you get a free pass from all the pain and suffering that awaits everyone else on Judgement Day. You go straight to heaven, and all

Emin Milli, a liberal Azerbaijani writer, told me that Tagi appeared to be recovering from his injuries in a state hospital and then took a turn for the worse. He wondered how that could be. He was as suspicious about the failure of westerners to take an interest in the murder of a writer, whose “crime” had been to speak his mind. He’d tried the BBC, newspapers… everyone he could think of and no one apart from Index on Censorship was interested. “Why don’t they care?”

Milli has a touchingly simple belief in the power of free speech, but his question was not as naive

it was rejected by the Senate, reportedly because of the objections of one senator, preventing it from becoming a law.

According to insiders, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam – Fazl senator Maulana Muhammad Sherani (presently the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology) had objected that the bill was not ‘male-friendly’ and was contradictory to Islamic law.

Later, the Council of Islamic Ideology also termed the bill “unnecessary”, adding that the implementation of this law would increase the rate of divorce in the country.

In other words, the law might make it possible for women to divorce men who beat them up, and that would be bad, so … Read the rest

Just a little more about Sholto. It doesn’t seem to have gone very well for him – the comments at the New Statesman are scathing, and Google blogsearch turns up only more scathe, no pleased cries of “At last somebody talking sense about sharia.” He must be feeling sadly disappointed in the multicultural broadmindedness and flexibility of – of – well of everybody but himself, I guess. There’s one comment at the NS that looks favorable at first blush, but when you read on it becomes obvious that it’s a parody. So Sholto is 0 for 0 with the “let’s look at the good side of sharia” enterprise.

Oh jeezis – the New Statesman is telling us to love sharia now – at least Sholto Byrnes is on the NS blog, and he wouldn’t be doing that if the NS didn’t approve. If you see an article in the Nation telling us to love Nazism you’re entitled to conclude that the Nation has lost its mind and is endorsing Nazism. Same with sharia – and yes they are pretty similar. They at least share a ballpark.

But the very concept of sharia has been so oversimplified by scaremongers that in the popular imagination it is inextricably linked with the punishments of beheading, flogging and amputation for crimes such as theft and adultery, and for which Saudi Arabia has